As a result of several trips to Project Bluebook, I’ve had an opportunity to examine quite carefully and in detail the types of reports that are made by Bluebook personnel. In most cases, I have found that there’s almost no correlation between so-called “evaluations or explanations” that are made by Bluebook and the facts of the case.... There are hundreds of good cases in the air force files that should have led to top-level scientific scrutiny of this problem, years ago, yet these cases have been swept under the rug in a most disturbing way by Project Bluebook investigators and their consultants.
And again:
I feel that the air force has misled us for twenty years. I equate almost all of that misrepresentation to incompetence and superficiality on the part of the air force investigators involved with Project Bluebook and its forerunners. Nobody there with any strong scientific competence is looking into the problem.
On April 22, 1967, McDonald assailed Donald Menzel before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “When he comes to analyzing UFO reports,” said McDonald,
he seems to calmly cast aside well-known scientific principles with almost abandon in an all-out effort to be sure that no UFO reports survives his attack.
“There is no sensible alternative,” he argued, “to the utterly shocking hypothesis that UFOs are extraterrestrial probes....” Menzel shot back that McDonald was a pseudoscientist with absurd views. A week later, McDonald told the press that he had learned from several “unquotable sources” that the air force had long been trying to unburden itself of the UFO problem and had tried twice to transfer its program to NASA.42
McDonald was vocal enough about UFOs that spring that he obtained assistance from United Nations Secretary General U Thant to lecture on the subject before the UN’s Outer Space Affairs Group on June 7. By the end of the month, he was in Australia on a small ONR grant to perform research in cloud physics. Unfortunately for McDonald, he had announced his intention to do some UFO investigating and lecturing there, in a memo to Low. In short time, this innocuous statement would backfire on him with significant repercussions. 43
THE COLORADO PROJECT IN MID-1967
By mid-1967, NICAP maintained what Keyhoe later called an “uneasy truce” with the Colorado Project. Actually, he had already decided to withhold any further cooperation: he was convinced that the air force was behind the project’s effort to obtain NICAP files. As a result, he held back the remaining big cases, in spite of requests for more reports. Besides, Keyhoe felt that the project members had not looked seriously at the good reports NICAP had already provided. Part of the problem, it must be said, was Keyhoe’s personality and authoritarian style of managing NICAP Even the sympathetic Saunders conceded that the situation was tolerable for NICAP members “only because they are interested in the problem and the major is out of the office as much as he is in.”44
On July 1, someone leaked information to the
Among themselves, project members were divided about UFOs. The situation recalls Project Sign in 1948. By midyear, several Colorado Project members, after reading reports and interviewing witnesses, believed the extraterrestrial hypothesis to be the most probable explanation of the difficult UFO cases. Moreover, as with Sign, the project’s leadership was hostile to a pro-ET explanation of UFOs, a situation that would soon force a showdown.46
By July, driven by Low’s insistence on “building the record,” plans were underway to compile a case book of the project’s best UFO cases. But this was no easy undertaking and would require a major effort by the whole staff. Richard Hall was therefore invited for two days of official consulting and narrowed the list to about one hundred cases of a good variety. A small group within the project then agreed to review those cases to decide which ones would receive more intensive analysis. From the beginning, the case book was behind schedule, despite its being Low’s special project. First of all, Low himself was not reading any cases, although he continued to push the project all through the Summer of Love. By default, Saunders became the one responsible for selecting cases. By August, it was moving at a snail’s pace—only twelve none-too-impressive cases were gathered—and clearly would not be ready by the hoped-for completion date of November 1967. The major problem, according to Saunders, was that the staff
